Studies in the Linguistic Sciences

CORE Metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk Provided by Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship Repository 8 LANGUAGE AND IDENTITY IN THE ASSYRIAN DIASPORA Erica McCliire The modern Assyrians are a Christian population from the Mid- dle East who trace their ancestry to the ancient Assyrian empire and who speak a Neo-Aramaic language. This chapter examines the link between language and identity in the Assyrian diaspora. It discusses the way in which Assyrian nationalists have constructed etymologies to support the claim that their ethnic group has always self-identified as Assyrian. It also documents their attempts to use modern Assyrian cognates with Akkadian, the language of the Assyrian empire, to support their thesis that the modern Assyrians are the descendants of the ancient Assyrians. In addition, this chapter examines how a de- veloping literary language and oral koine have had an important part in the development and maintenance of Assyrian national conscious- ness and how a political goal, the unification of different Middle Eastern Christian communities as one national group, has led Assyrian nationalists to treat as one language dialects that linguists consider to belong to separate languages. Finally, this chapter discusses the role that codeswitching plays in affimiing Assyrian ethnic group membership and establishing boundaries between Assyrians and members of other ethnic groups. Has a nationality anything dearer than the speech of its fathers? In its speech resides its whole thought domain, its tradition, history, religion, and basis of Life, all its heart and soul. To deprive a people of its speech is to deprive it of its one eternal good ... With language is cre- ated the heart of a people (Herder 1783, cited by Fishman 1972:1). Introduction As the quotation above from the German philosopher and theologian Johann Gottfried von Herder indicates, scholars have long recognized that there is an in- timate relationship between the language a people speaks and that people's social identity. Today, that relationship is the focus of interest to social scientists Diaspora. Identity, and Laniiua^e Communities (Studies in ihc Linguistic Sciences 31:1, Spring 2001) 108 Diaspora, Identity, and Language Communities from a wide range of disciplines who are investigating issues of nationalism and ethnicity. Lambert 1979 and Giles 1979, among others, have noted that even a small amount of oral language produced by a speaker may be sufficient to elicit a fuU set of ethnic attributes in the mind of a hearer. Fishman (1989:47), a scholar particularly renowned for his work on language and ethnicity, notes that although the link between language and ethnicity 'is not an inevitable one, it is clearly a highly likely one, both as a result of the general symbolic function of i language as well as because of its specific implication in the paternity, patrimony, and phenomenology dimensions of ethnicity experiences'. Enninger (1991:24) claims that the specific design features of human language make linguistic per- formance the prime medium for the projection of ethnicity. The role of language in marking ethnicity and in-group versus out-group relationships has also been ex- tensively treated by those scholars investigating the phenomena of codeswitching (cf. Gumperz 1982; Heller 1988; and Myers-Scotten 1993). The case for the centrality of language in the construction of social identity is well summarized in the following quote from Le Page & Tabouret- Keller (1985:248): In language, however, we are offered by the society we enter and we offer to others, a very overt symbolization of ourselves and our universe, not only in the various grammars and lexicons and prosodies we can create for various domains of that universe, but also through the social marking which each occasion of use carries. Language is not only the focal centre of our acts of identity; it also consists of metaphors, and our focusing of it is around such metaphors or symbols. The notion that words refer to or denote 'things' in 'the real world' is very widely upheld, but quite misplaced; they are used with reference to concepts in the mind of the user; these symbols are the means by which we define ourselves and others. While it is clear that language generally has an important role in the construction of social identity, it may come to have a particularly important role in diaspora communities whose members may feel threatened by a loss of or uncertainty about ethnic identity. Such problems are particularly intense within the Assyrian community for two reasons. First, the Assyrians do not have their own nation state or even any type of autonomy within an existing nation state. Furthermore, it is possible that today there are more Assyrians living in diaspora than in their traditional homeland because of the oppression that they face there. Second, ethnic identity has been a shifting social construct for Assyrians. Indeed, there is no^ general consensus in the present-day Assyrian community, either with respect t« the existing peoples who should be included within the ethnic group, or with respect to the historical origins of these peoples; and, to some extent, that uncertainty is mirrored in the scholarly community. The uncertainty about the roots of the ethnic group, Assyrian, Aramean, other, or a combination thereof, has given rise to very acrimonious debates over the very names to be used in designating it,' and the language its members speak. Erica McClure: Language and identity in the Assyrian diaspora 109 Its people have called themselves and been called by others Assyrians, Suryaye, Suraye, Suroye, Curyaye, Syrian!, Aramaeans, Chaldeans, Assyro-Chaldeans, among other labels. The language they speak is commonly known in the community as Surit, but is referred to by Assyrian nationaUsts as leshana aturaya, the 'Assyrian language". The term 'Assyrian' will be used here to refer to the ethnic group, since that is the term currently given greatest acceptance;^ and, following Tsereteli 1978 and Odisho 1988, the language spoken by the ethnic group wiU also be called 'Assyrian". However, it should be pointed out that the name 'Assyrian", when applied to the Neo-Aramaic languages and dialects spoken by members of this group, is somewhat misleading, since they belong to the West Semitic branch of the Semitic language family, while the term Assyrian has tradi- tionally been applied by linguists to the dialect or language (Semiticists differ with respect to the status they accord it) spoken in the Assyrian Empire, which together with Babylonian is known as Akkadian. Akkadian formed the East Se- mitic branch of the Semitic family and is extinct. The Assyrians of today are a Middle Eastern people whose traditional homeland included Turkey, Iran, Iraq, and Syria. Two dimensions are typically used in determining Assyrian ethnic group membership — religion and mother tongue. To be considered a member of the ethnic group, a person must, first, be a Christian, and second, a native speaker of a Neo-Aramaic language or dialect. In the Middle East, where the Christian Assyrians are a very small minority in a mostly Moslem world, it is their Christianity that is perhaps their most salient characteristic. In diaspora in a mostly Christian world, it is their mother tongue that most clearly distinguishes them. However, neither mother tongue nor rehgion, nor even the union of the two, offers a totally unambiguous criterion for group membership. First, Middle Eastern Christian Neo-Aramaic speakers do not all belong to the same religious denomination. Although today some belong to Protestant de- nominations and a few belong to the Syrian Catholic church, historically they have belonged primarily to three churches. These are the Nestorean Church or Church of the East, the first organized Christian church in the world; the Chaldean Church, a uniate Catholic Church which broke off from the Church of the East; and the Jacobite Church, also called the Syrian Orthodox Church, which is separate from the group of Eastern Orthodox Churches, which includes the Bulgarian, Greek, Romanian, and Russian Orthodox Churches. For some Assyrians, only those people who are members of the Church of the East are truly Assyrians, while, for others, any Christian Neo-Aramaic speaker is an Assyrian. Members of the Church of the East generally tend to have em- braced the Assyrian ethnic identity, while many members of the Chaldean Church simply consider themselves Chaldean, and many members of the Syrian Orthodox Church consider themselves to be Aramaeans. Furthermore, while some members of one religious denomination consider members of the other two to belong to the same ethnic group if ihcy are Neo-Aramaic speakers — even though they may 3 110 Diaspora, Identity, and Language Communities have disagreements with those people as to the appropriate ethnic-group label — other people do not accept even Christian Neo-Aramaic speakers as members of the same ethnic group if they do not belong to the same religious denomination. There are two additional complications to this picture. While all Chaldeans from Iran are Neo-Aj-amaic speakers, not all Chaldeans from Iraq speak a Neo- Aramaic dialect: Some speak only Arabic. Arabic-speaking Chaldeans are considered to be Christian Arabs by some Assyrians, while others, at least at some level and for some purposes, include Arabic-speaking Chaldeans as members of the Assyrian ethnic group. Indeed, in political discussions, some Assyrians claim as fellow ethnic-group members all Christians whose churches use, or have in the past used, Syriac as their liturgical language, thereby including even the Maro- nites of Lebanon. Not only religious affiliation but also linguistic background can be a source of complications in the definition of who is, in fact, an Assyrian.

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